Beneath Batman’s Cape: Finding the Hero in All of Us

Normal? Hardly

Many words could be used to describe Batman: Strong. Smart. Snappy dresser. But the world “normal?” It probably wouldn’t come up. Batman is about as normal as a seven-legged cow, as humdrum as Lady Gaga bungee jumping. This is a guy who buys corporations before lunch and fights crime after dinner—a man who wears Kevlar body armor and battles nefarious supervillians as a hobby. “A guy who dresses up like a bat clearly has issues,” Bruce Wayne says in Batman Begins. But yet as different as Batman may seem from us on the outside, we actually have a lot in common. And as we read in Paul Asay’s book God on the Streets of Gotham, the Dark Knight has some lessons he can teach us—about life, faith and what it means to be a hero.